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  • mccmcc@mastodon.social
    Aug 20, 2026, 3:21 PM

    @doriane Two possible theories; only one is true.

    Theory 1. ActivityPub has no "center"; each server handles only its own traffic. This means that if a startup wanted to start an ActivityPub startup, it cannot justify its own existence. Users could simply not use the startup's products, meaning you can't move from the "expand" to "cash in" phases. Forcing everything through the funnel of the relay makes the startup "necessary". You can only replace the startup with ops resources equal to it.

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Replies

  • mccmcc@mastodon.social
    Aug 20, 2026, 3:24 PM

    @doriane Theory 2. Entire-network full text search. Ex-Twitter users expect this; in practice you cannot implement it with high quality user experience unless every "node" in your decentralized network has access to every message in the network. If this is a "must have", the rest of Bluesky's architecture (scrape PDSes->relay funnel->AppView) falls out naturally. The relay means every AppView sees everything that happens and can build its index accordingly

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  • fedward :omya:fedward@distraction.party
    Aug 20, 2026, 3:53 PM
    @mcc @doriane I may be missing something but I don't think those two theories are mutually exclusive. If the path from expansion to profit extraction has to go through a single point for which there's no commercially viable competitor, then you kind of need both the unique protocol (so somebody else can't easily stand up a competitive service provider on "your" network) and the (perceived) competitive advantage (in this case, a "single" network with easier onboarding that also, coincidentally, offers functional indexing and search).
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  • mccmcc@mastodon.social
    Aug 21, 2026, 2:56 PM

    @fedward @doriane What I'd consider the synthesis theory:

    Bluesky started as an attempt by Jack Dorsey to neutralize the Fediverse as a threat to Twitter.

    Then it got handed off to some protocol designers who were earnestly thinking about free, decentralized networks, but sketching within Dorsey's lines.

    Then it got handed off to this company of ex-Twitter engineers, who don't necessarily care about (and haven't been trying to preserve—features like DMs, bookmarks go around it) centralization

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  • mccmcc@mastodon.social
    Aug 21, 2026, 3:07 PM

    @fedward @doriane (cont'd)

    …then this group of ex-Twitter engineers are trying to operate a website for this group of ex-Twitter users. And the ex-Twitter users may or may not care about *either* the things the things the decentralized-protocol designer cared about (which may not be the same *kind* of decentralization Mastodon users care about), *or* the things the ex-Twitter engineers care about (like garnering investment rounds and stock options).

    And then to all this, you add "vibecoding".

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  • ungualdoriane@post.lurk.org
    Aug 20, 2026, 9:18 PM

    @mcc oh so it's really like activitypub is a lot of little islands and well you can't see a faraway island from your island if you never went there and that's it that's the nature of knowing and not knowing

    while atp is more a babel-tower/panopticon in the center of the islands and whenever you want to know if an island exist you ask mr. know-it-all the big source of truth, and all the islands must conform to effectively know everything otherwise they are bad islands?

    is it an anarchist ideologies versus humanist ideologies type of situation?

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  • ungualdoriane@post.lurk.org
    Aug 20, 2026, 9:28 PM

    @mcc if anyone else is reading this thread with my level of knowledge, PDS means Personal Data Server (took me 5 links with PDS used until i reached the acronynim unfolding), which is like when you copy the big index on your own server, like your island that's a copy of other islands?

    also the thing that send all the synching data so that the PDS stay in synch (to be sure you have eyes everywhere) is called a "firehose" like big data pipelines?

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  • ungualdoriane@post.lurk.org
    Aug 20, 2026, 9:35 PM

    @mcc is ATProtocol interoperability for people who believe in democracy and is the answer yes?

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  • mccmcc@mastodon.social
    Aug 21, 2026, 3:33 PM

    @Aedius @doriane Hypothesis:

    You can imagine that if this has happened to you multiple times— livejournal enshittified, twitter enshittified— you just kind of expect everything enshittifies, and instead of going "I want a site that will never enshittify on me!" you go "guess I'm switching sites every four years for the rest of my life. here's the new one. let's see how long this one lasts"

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  • mccmcc@mastodon.social
    Aug 21, 2026, 3:19 PM

    @doriane

    PDS (all user posts are stored here. anyone can connect to a PDS endpoint and get a live feed of a user's posts. or a combined feed of all user's posts)
    ⬇️
    Relay (connects to every PDS's combined feed. you can connect to an endpoint and get a giant combined combined feed)
    ⬇️
    AppView (Connects to a relay. Puts every post in a big database.)
    ⬇️
    Client (Web page or phone app that shows posts from an AppView)

    I'm happy to explain terms but ATP is so complicated, I can't fit it all in one pos

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  • ungualdoriane@post.lurk.org
    Aug 21, 2026, 9:35 AM

    @Aedius @mcc like when a team of intellectual think they will do something for the good of humanity, a new form of utopia, the right model for knowledge, etc etc, but of course by doing so they end up not making space for difference, wilderness, contamination, and lowkey imposing stuff in the name of rational thinking or something because they way they did is "better"

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  • ungualdoriane@post.lurk.org
    Aug 21, 2026, 9:38 AM

    @Aedius @mcc it's like "for the good of everyone" but with a high dose of unchecked patriarchal thinking, and a bit of authoritative evangelism of your ideas because they're "objectively better"

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  • ungualdoriane@post.lurk.org
    Aug 21, 2026, 9:41 AM

    @Aedius @mcc i mean that's what i thought, but i'm also seeing atproto enthousiasts speaking about it with smart words like governance, interoperability, communities, etc so idk i figure i might just ask the people here :)

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  • Aedius Filmania ⚙️🎮🖊️Aedius@lavraievie.social
    Aug 21, 2026, 9:46 AM

    @doriane @mcc

    Well it's a for profit corporation, not a non profit organization.

    They want to finance the network with premium feature so they need to keep users in their net.

    How do they sell premium feature if anyone can run an interoperable system for free with this feature ? They can't and they will close their api, like twitter did long before Musk.

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  • ungualdoriane@post.lurk.org
    Aug 21, 2026, 9:50 AM

    @Aedius @mcc for bluesky access sure, and i globally agree. but i think i understood you could make your own PDS with your own identity handlers things, and that people are making ATP communities that are entirely independent, but i must say i don't really get if there is any strong infrastructure dependencies between the two.

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  • mccmcc@mastodon.social
    Aug 21, 2026, 2:51 PM

    @Aedius @doriane Yes, I use it. It is very nice. Except that notifications are partially broken, and the support folks are helpful but they can't fix the notifications issue, because I'm not using Bluesky PDS. Which is reasonable, but sort of pulls the decentralized thing into question.

    And I wonder, as the Bluesky network gets larger and people start doing things other than posting microblogs on it, how hard or easy it will be for Blacksky and Eurosky to keep up with *literally all content*.

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  • Oblomovoblomov@sociale.network
    Aug 22, 2026, 3:41 PM

    @mcc @Aedius @doriane OTOH, the Fediverse support for alternative forms of content is severely crippled by Mastodon's dominance (which is e.g. the reason why WordPress blogs when federating often prefer to use the Note object rather than the more appropriate Article object, or why Pixelfed publishes its images as Notes too, IIRC). Of course this could theoretically solved by more type-agnostic servers, but we still don't have them 8-(

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  • mccmcc@mastodon.social
    Aug 21, 2026, 3:39 PM

    @doriane @Aedius A thing to remember about ATProto *enthusiasts*— as distinct from *people who are being paid by Bluesky*— is they're interested in a particular *kind* of openness. ATProto makes it very hard to reproduce the stack, where Mastodon makes it easy. But ATProto's super-fragmented design makes it easy to make add-on apps and tools, much easier than Mastodon. The enthusiasts are enthusiastic because ATProto lets them *do things* that they wouldn't be able to do without ATProto.

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  • mccmcc@mastodon.social
    Aug 21, 2026, 3:41 PM

    @doriane @Aedius And I think they are fools, because their interoperability and communities are entirely dependent on Bluesky continuing to be nice and not (as Aedius brought up) closing their API like Twitter did, because bluesky pbllc has too much power in the governance model.

    But maybe everything will turn out okay and bluesky pbllc will never go full evil and will continue providing infrastructure for free indefinitely. Maybe I will be wrong!

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